In my recent post I publicized the upcoming minisymposium Establishing a Professional Presence in the Online World: Unraveling the Mysteries of Social Media and More organized by Tammy Kolda and I at the 2013 SIAM Annual Meeting in San Diego.

We had an enjoyable session. Despite being in the most far flung and hard to find room on the site, we had a good-sized audience who contributed useful questions and thoughts.

The slides for the four talks are downloadable from the previous post. Here, I summarize a few key points from each talk.

Tammy Kolda (Sandia National Labs) described how to export BibTeX entries for journal articles to html via the JabRef reference manager. The resulting html includes an abstract, keywords, and hyperlinks to the DOI, a PDF file, an expurgated BibTeX entry and a preprint version (assuming all this information is present in the entry). The idea is that the html can be used for lists of publications on a web page. I haven’t used Jabref for a while, but intend to try this export filter out. Tammy also gave a flowchart answering the question of how and where to post a publication list.

David Gleich

David Gleich (Purdue University) gave his presentation using Prezi, a cloud-based presentation tool that produces “multiscale” slides that zoom in and out. He surveyed the main social media tools and classified them into categories 1-1, 1-many and many-many. He then explained how he keeps on top of information using Flipboard, Feedly and Instapaper daily.

I described reasons for mathematicians to blog or tweet and the features that characterize a good blog. I also gave tips for using WordPress and Twitter and described SIAM’s plans for a SIAM blog.

Nick Higham

Finally, Karthika Muthukumaraswamy (SIAM Public Awareness Officer) gave a compelling explanation of why mathematicians and scientists should blog and how the web is changing science communication. She also explained the benefits of blog networks, in which several people contribute to a blog, and the motivation for the planned SIAM blog.